by Gideon, John
In the fuming dream fueled by Renzy’s words, Carl saw little Mitch Nistler, the homely and unpromising son of a local ne’er-do-well, the sad and retiring child whom other kids mercilessly tormented, a sorry specimen whose destruction would deny the world nothing of value. A perfect candidate to carry the demon’s seed.
The scene shifted: Ted Dawkins calling regularly at the Nistlers’ shack near the marina, delivering bitter-tasting food laced with magic potions and little “toys” that were really charms. Charity, supposedly—but in actuality, a polluting combination that damned poor Mitch to failure throughout his childhood, that compounded his weaknesses, rendered him malleable.
Ted and Alita Dawkins now, huddling together in the undercroft of Whiteleather Place, brewing potions and casting spells aimed at the local undertaker, Matt Kronmiller. So that’s how Mitch landed a job after prison, a job that put him in a position to steal a corpse when the time was right.
But this was not a dream, not a nightmare. It was real!
And the steward, of course, was to be Jeremy, selected before the boy was even born. Carl saw Alita hovering and fussing over the pregnant Lorna, all under the guise of friendship, taking every opportunity to pollute Lorna’s food with poisonous magical herbs and mixtures, leaving little hand-carved “figurines” around the Trosper house, which were supposed to cheer and amuse, but which were actually powerful charms. Alita’s magic proved successful: Jeremy was born an empty vessel, a child who seemed to lack a soul, perfect clay for the hands of Hadrian Craslowe.
And that brings up the matter of Lorna, said Renzy.
Carl cried out again in pain and rage—not only because the demon was tearing another strip of muscle from his shoulder, but also because he was seeing Lorna, hearing Lorna, as she announced with dancing eyes that they were going to have a baby.
And later, with tearful and desperate eyes, that she knew something was horribly wrong with their little Jeremy.
And much later, with empty eyes, saying that she would give Carl a divorce, as he wanted.
Carl roared with molten anger, heard his own voice reverberating against stone, felt it batter his eardrums when it bounced back.
Ah, yes, Lorna, who fell into Hadrian’s clutches like a ripe berry, said Renzy.
“Bush, I was the one who suggested that she take Jeremy to see Hadrian. And then I helped drive her crazy—even started taking her to bed in order to get the job done. Oh, I can’t really take much credit for her killing herself—Jeremy was the one who really pushed her over the edge, which you’ve probably guessed by now. I just did what Hadrian told me to do. If you’ve got Whiteleather blood in your veins, you don’t say no to Hadrian.”
Carl’s lungs erupted with another enraged roar. “Why, Renzy? Why did you do it? Why didn’t you fight him? You could’ve fought him!”
“No!” screamed Renzy, stepping deeper into the blackness. “I couldn’t fight him, Carl! That’s what I’m trying to tell you. I can’t let you think that I—”
“You’re an obscenity! An animal! Lorna was good, Renzy, the only really good thing in my life!” The Giver’s fangs sank again. Its spongy lips closed tight on the wound. Carl felt himself weakening, miring in a lake of pain. In his mind he saw a faded old photograph hanging on the bulkhead of Kestrel, Renzy’s yacht, the picture of a rumpled seaman, Tristan Whiteleather. At the captain’s side stood a somber man with a silvery hair and spectacles that exaggerated his watery eyes. The silver-haired man, Carl knew now, was Hadrian Craslowe, Renzy’s lord. The hurt was like a fountain in his chest.
“You’ve got to understand something, Carl,” said Renzy tremulously, sinking to his knees while leaning on the baseball bat. “After my parents died, Hadrian did something to my sister, to Diana—cursed her, made her into what she is now. She hasn’t spoken a word since that day—just sits in an empty room and stares at a wall. How’s that grab you, Bush? My sister, the most beautiful girl in Greely’s Cove, the heart-breaker to end all heartbreakers, sitting alone in a room, unable to speak or appreciate music. Remember what an incredible musician she was? Remember the grand piano upstairs?” Carl’s world was swimming, and he could barely hear Renzy’s trembling words. He wondered whether he was dying and hoped that he was.
“Hadrian did it to guarantee my cooperation, to make sure that I would always be around to help him. He promised to lift the curse someday”—Renzy coughed and whimpered—“if I did everything he wanted. Don’t you see, Carl? I didn’t want to hurt you or Lorna. What happened to Jeremy wasn’t my idea.
I was only trying to give Diana a chance to live a normal life, to get out of that—that place. And when that day comes—”
“Help me, Renzy! If you’ve ever cared about me”—Carl’s voice was a tortured croak, and his body had gone limp—“then for God’s sake, kill it! Kill it, Renzy!”
The kneeling man raised his eyes, and his tearful stare bore into the darkness. “I can’t, Bush—don’t you see? Diana’s only hope is Hadrian. I know this sounds a little crazy, but I can’t just run out on her. I can’t let her live the rest of her life in a fucking cell. Try to understand—”
“Kill it!”
“No, I won’t, Bush! If I never accomplish anything else, I’m going to free my sister, give her some kind of life. Oh, I’ll still end up like my parents, with too much guilt to carry around, and I’ll put a fucking bullet in my head. I’ll think of you when I do it, all that my family has done to yours, what I’ve helped do to you and Lorna. And I’ll think of all the good times we’ve had together—God!” Renzy choked and sobbed, wiping away tears with the sleeve of his jacket. But when he looked up again his face was hard, his voice controlled. “I’m going to do what I have to do, Bush, and I’ll kill anyone who tries to interfere.
I just want you to know that I’m sorry.”
Lindsay heard a sound that was hard and metallic, and she undertook the monstrous task of raising her head and focusing her eyes. Someone passed by her in the dark, actually stepping over her body and moving toward the ruddy candle glow of the undercroft. A man, apparently, short and painfully thin, a long gun across his arms. The metallic noise had been the chambering of a shell.
She organized herself, got legs and arms under control, willed a halt to the dizzy spin of her vision, and stood up. She inched along the wall on fluttery legs in pursuit of the dark figure who was now stepping into the undercroft, who was carefully making his way around the huddled forms of Robbie and Hannie, heading toward the black archway. Lindsay moved closer.
Carl whistles around the toothpick in his teeth as he drives his clunky Chevy van along the lonely wooded road, and he feels good, very good. The summer afternoon is warm and coppery, he has half a six of cold Rainier on the seat beside him, and there’s a pretty whore tied up in the cargo bed.
Her terrified squeals are music, sweet music.
Taking a whore has become ridiculously easy in recent years, especially along Seattle’s Second Avenue, where the young runaways have begun to flock like dirty little starlings. Unwary and lacking street smarts, a hungry runaway kid will swallow any line that ends with the promise of twenty bucks and a hit of good dope. And once she’s in the van with him, it’s Lay Down the Newspapers and Let the Puppy In, Martha, ’Cause It’s All Over But the Shoutin’. And the Fuckin’, of course. And the Stabbin’ and the Slicin’ and the Dyin’.
Carl giggles, shifts the toothpick to the other corner of his mouth, and turns left onto a forest road marked Lake Morton. He likes this area for its ample cover of trees and brush, for the fact that it’s virtually deserted on weekdays and yet so close to Seattle. Having discovered this place, he can now do his thing and get back on the cannery line within two hours.
He halts the van in a shady clearing well off the road, kills the engine, and squeezes between the seats into the sweltering cargo area.
“Time for the main event, sweetie pie,” he says around the toothpick, grinning. The spindly, dark-haired girl struggles desperately again
st the belts that cut into her wrists and ankles, then forces a mewling groan through the wide strip of tape that covers her mouth. Carl thrills to that sound, to the smart scent of her fearful sweat, to the sight of her panicky tears. He gathers her roughly into his arms, kicks open the rear door of the van, and carries her into the brush.
“Wanna know somethin’, sweetie pie?” He lays her onto a leafy bed of fem and tawny grass now, withdrawing a long hunting knife from beneath his fishnet shirt. “As of this moment, you’ve got a new name. Wanna know what it is?” More squeals and sobs from the girl. A shudder of expectant horror. “It ain’t Cathy or Jennifer or Amber or anything like that. And it ain’t Georgia or Cookie, either. You really wanna know what it is?”
He applies the blade to the front of her flimsy blue blouse, and the fabric rends, exposing her tiny, sweat-slick breasts. Down the blade goes, lipping through the waistband of her acid-washed denim shorts, under which she is bare, trembling.
“It ain’t Alice or Judy.” His voice becomes hoarse and breathy as he stares at her nakedness. “Or Debbie or Bonnie. You really wanna know what your new name is, sweetie pie?” His tattooed hands tear at his own belt and zipper and push his filthy jeans down. His ramrod penis jumps free.
No! This isn’t me! I’m Carl Tros—
Oh, but this is Carl Trosper, whose calloused hands are spreading wide the poor child’s thighs. This is Carl Trosper, whose mindless cock is digging deep and almost immediately squirting, squirting. Whose knife is now held high, glinting in a stray ray of sunlight through the forest cover—
No! I won’t do this thing! I won’t!
—and plunging suddenly downward.
“Seventy-six! That’s your new name, sweetie pie: Number Seventy-six! Number Seventy-six! Number Seventy-six!”
With every shout the blade plunges, sundering flesh and bone and vessels. Flinging bright webs of blood into the air, onto the mass of fems and grass. Spattering Carl’s face and arms and hands, turning the afternoon red.
“Number Seventy-six! Number Seventy-six!” The sin is exquisite, hideously delicious. The blood and gore, the final tremor of death, the frenzy of bloated hatred unleashed for the seventy-sixth time: He drinks it all in, savors it, relishes the evil.
No! It’s not me! It’s not me!
Carl drew strength from the remnant of his soul that he still owned and willed himself out of the dream, forced his consciousness to flee.
To flee.
Away from the dream and back to—
Back home. To safety. Back to the bungalow on Second Avenue in Greely’s Cove, where his mother waits.
Some small sound must have warned Renzy Dawkins, because he rose from his knees, turned away from the friend whom he had forsaken to the Giver of Dreams, and saw Mitch Nistler, of all people. The little man stood only a few paces away and was holding a shotgun on him.
“O Lord, Mitch, you don’t mean this,” breathed Renzy, his dark face weary, his eyes bleary. “There’s nothing you can accomplish here. Now give me the gun.”
But Mitch did indeed mean it, which was clear in the steadiness of his gaze, in the relaxed little smile on his lips. He was about to do something good, and he felt wonderful.
“I said, give me the gun, Mitch. I don’t have time for this.” Renzy raised the baseball bat and took a threatening step forward. And Mitch pulled the trigger. A white-hot ball leapt from the muzzle and tore most of Renzy’s head away, flinging his rag-doll body into the dark maw. Mitch chambered another shell and turned toward the jerking form of Hadrian Craslowe, which leaned against the wall to his right. The sorcerer was sparking back to life now, regaining his faculties, healing quickly from the drubbing Hannie had given him. His oily eyes were bulbous and furiously aglow, his monstrous hands coiling and uncoiling as limberness soaked into them again.
At his feet Jeremy, too, was stirring.
Mitch leveled the shotgun directly into Craslowe’s face and fired. The walnut scowl disappeared in another explosion of light and fire, but Craslowe did not go down. The mangled spoilage that had been his face moved and writhed, shaping itself into what could have been a grin. His demon-hands closed about the muzzle of the shotgun and twisted it from Mitch’s grip, bending and warping the metal. What seconds ago had been eyes turned toward Hannie and Robbie, and a horrible laugh gurgled out of the indefinite gap that had been a mouth, spraying blood into the air like water from a lawn sprinkler. As Jeremy regained his feet, Craslowe moved stiffly toward Hannie and Robbie, needing no eyes, reaching toward them with his taloned hands.
Lindsay alighted at Robbie’s side, helped him shield Hannie Hazelford from the palpable wrath that flowed from Craslowe, and fully expected to die within the following seconds. Robbie traded terrible glances with her, then pulled himself to a kneeling position, to face the oncoming monstrosity. He launched a blast of psychic energy, the biggest he could muster—a chunk of granite the size of a cement mixer. The sorcerer reeled under it and staggered backward a step but still did not go down. Though temporarily drained of killing magic, Craslowe still clearly possessed a semblance of his defensive powers. And he meant to destroy these interlopers, not with magic, but with his talons, to slice and shred them into bits of flinching meat. He lurched forward again, laughing out gobbets of flesh and gouts of blood.
Oh, this is better, much better indeed. So good to be home again.
His mother stands in the doorway of the little bedroom that she has converted into a watercolor studio, facing him with wide, hopeless eyes. Her jaw hangs loose and her mouth yawns in terror. One hand is thrust deep into the tangles of her blond hair, while the other grips the front of her paint-spattered smock, as though clutching a wound. She seems to be having difficulty breathing.
Carl issues a silken giggle. It won’t be long now.
“Surely you understand that there’s only one thing left to do, Mother,” he says in his child’s voice. “There’s really no reason for delay, is there?”
His mother staggers against the doorframe, letting her gaze wander over the carnage around her. The furniture is broken and shredded, the walls gouged and holed. Heaps of garbage lie on the floors. This is all Carl’s handiwork—weeks and months worth of incapacitating Lorna with his newfound power, smashing her belongings without even touching them, probing deep into her mind and soul to root out her blackest secrets and emotions. God almighty, it’s been such fun.
“W-why are you doing this, Jeremy?” she stammers through a wash of fresh tears. “Why do you hate me so much?”
“Quite simply because you’re you,” he answers with British-style matter-of-factness. “Put another way, for the same reason you hate yourself. We both know what you are, don’t we? A filthy whore, a slut, a—”
“Just because I’ve been spending time with Renzy—is that why you hate me?”
“There’s much more to it than that, Mother. What about all those times you wished that I was dead, that I’d never been born? Before my recovery, I mean? Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten.” He laughs with gusto and thrills to the pain his laughter causes. “I was a helpless child who could do nothing for himself, a pitiful shell of a boy who depended on you for everything. I hadn’t asked to be born sick, Mother, hadn’t asked to be born at all. And yet, you wished that I would die, that I’d free you to pursue your own frivolous wants and cravings, your ridiculous art
“That’s not true! I loved you, Jeremy! I’ve always loved you!”
“It’s senseless to lie to me, Mother. I can see inside you.” Which he can, of course, thanks to this wonderful power he has gotten at Whiteleather Place. He sees and tells. He tortures his mother yet again with truths uprooted from the darkest depths of her mind.
Yes, there were times when Lorna nearly crumbled under the stress of caring for her impaired son, times when she yearned to shut herself away with her watercolors rather than mop up the fecal messes that appeared daily throughout the house. Times when she craved freedom from her son’s mindless screeching a
nd howling, wanting nothing more than to be alone in a world of orderliness and quiet. Occasionally she wished desperately that God would take the boy through some painless accident or disease, liberating her to a normal life.
She shudders and cowers from her son’s words, presses her hands over her desiccated cheeks, screams. “But I still loved you, Jeremy! I never would’ve done anything to hurt—”
I’m not Jeremy! I’m not—
Carl unleashes a surge of energy that chokes off her voice. “Don’t try to rationalize, Mother. The fact is, you wanted me dead—me, your only child, your own flesh and blood. You wanted me out of the way so you could devote yourself to your stupid little gallery, so you’d have time for your precious painting. You actually wished that I’d be hit by a car, or that I’d stick my finger in an electrical socket so you’d be free to hobnob with your worthless, small-minded friends, the good citizens of Greely’s Cove, the same people who laughed at you behind your back for not locking me away in an institution. You loved your community projects, your fund-raising drives and your bloody art shows more than you loved me.”
“Jeremy, you’ve got to understand—sometimes I just got so tired! My mind would play horrible tricks—”
“Enough of your fucking lies! You wished me dead, because you were selfish and wanton, because you thought that I was the killer of all your cheap little dreams! You thought of me as your jailor, as the weight around your neck!”
“No, Jeremy!” Her eyes roll hideously, and she wraps her thin arms over her chest, trembling.
He is close now, so very close. Lorna’s reason is wearing thin, stretched to the point of breakage. Time for the piece de resistance, the final hammer stroke that will finish the job. Carl shuts his hazel eyes tight, concentrates, gathers himself to launch a bolt of psychic power. He has been saving this for just the right moment.
God in heaven, I’m not Jeremy! I know what this is!
The walls begin to vibrate and the whole house shudders and squeaks. Sawdust and flecks of plaster seep down from cracks in the ceiling. A riot of wind tears at Lorna’s clothing, twists her around to face the interior of her studio, where the walls are hung with a score of her paintings. One by one the wind assaults the mountings, shattering the glass, warping the frames, shredding the paper. Hundreds of hours worth of loving work explode into wreckage before her terrified eyes. When the last painting meets its end, the wind moves on to the other rooms of the house, to other walls where Lorna’s art hangs: landscapes, seascapes, still lifes, portraits. Rumbling blows from an invisible sledgehammer. Ripping. Tinkling. Splintering.